Books

This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 19, 2023. You really ought to subscribe :) Art by Ricardo Siri Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships. Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning. Some are handheld lights you can shine on almost anything. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 10th, 2023. You really ought to subscribe :) I took close to a year to finish two of the books from last years reading list. That’s because I was reading them, in tiny bits, in small chunks, a day at a time I was already reading a poem a day and then some time early last year I serendiptioustly ran into this Ryan Holiday post, which spoke to the virtues and pleasures of page-a-day books and daily wisdom.1 So, along with my daily poem, I read a Robert Greene reader called The Daily Laws as well as the Ryan Holiday–Stephen Hanselman collection of Stoic meditations in The Daily Stoic. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 11th, 2022. You really ought to subscribe :) Hello, hello, it me! :) With all that is going on in my life, I don’t have the will or wherewithal to compile the annual reading list this year. So I’ll keep sending you folks, the lists that I come across and find compelling enough to share. I’ve always ended my annual books-to-read list with the Marginalian. (the erstwhile Brain Pickings aka Maria Popova) And I always say, Maria saved my life. For nearly a decade, during times of deep dark despair, it was her posts that kept me going. ...

Alternate Subtitle: The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books. via a Tom Gauld Book1 Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done. ...

Stolen from Tom Gauld’s Tumblr. click pic to embiggen …

GRRM in his latest not-a-blog-post, references this video on the two types of authors, he lumps writer-folk into. Just like him, I try to structure and outline what I write, I really do, and just like him, I can do it fairly ok, and still never really enjoy the process. ...